Apple releases Grand Central Dispatch into the Open Source community

In a move that has surprised many, Apple has decided to open source their multiprocessor task management technology known as Grand Central Dispatch. This comes as a surprise because the technology has barely gotten into the hands of customers through 10.6 Snow Leopard, and it’s widely considered to be a competitive advantage. So why would Apple release such a thing into the open source community? AppleInsider offers this possible explanation:

“Significant new outside interest in Grand Central Dispatch could result in a wider support base for building parallelism compatible with Apple’s other open technologies, such as OpenCL. The availability of the dispatcher on Linux and other Unix operating systems would also help generate demand for other command line utilities that tap into its power. That would help Apple leverage its technologies in markets where it has a minority position, such as in the enterprise and supercomputing.”

Grand Central Dispatch is not the only Apple technology to be open sourced however. The core technology behind the Safari webbrowser, known as WebKit, is also an open source project, which has led to the development of Google’s Chrome browser and other webkit-based browsers (which all tend to be lightning fast).